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Prentanier for Soup
Cut into lozenge-shaped pieces two medium carrots and two medium white turnips. Place them in a saucepan with one gill cold water, half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon powdered sugar and one tablespoon butter. Cover the vegetables with a piece of buttered white paper. Cover the pan; let come to a boil; place the pan in the hot oven for thirty minutes. Remove the vegetables from the oven and add them to the strained consomme in the pan, adding three tablespoons canned French green peas, three tablespoons canned string beans cut into small pieces, and three tablespoons canned asparagus tips also cut into small pieces. Let the whole cook gently for five minutes, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
This is a garnish, not a standalone soup: the vegetables are glazed separately, then dropped into finished consommé at the last minute. The hinge is the buttered paper and the tight lid, which trap steam so the carrots and turnips cook in their own moisture and finish glossy rather than boiled grey.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. It should be barely enough to come partway up the vegetables, not to cover them.
- "The hot oven"Read that as 400-425F. The point is a steady simmer inside the covered pan, so check at 20 minutes; carrots cut small can be tender well before thirty.
- The buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on one side and laid directly on the vegetables, buttered face down. Modern parchment serves the same purpose as the period's "white paper."
- Lozenge-shaped piecesDiamonds about a quarter-inch thick, cut from planks of carrot and turnip. Uniformity matters more than shape, since the whole batch comes out of the oven at once.
- Canned vegetablesWhen this was written, canned French peas, beans and asparagus tips were among the few ways to get spring vegetables out of season. Frozen petits pois and fresh beans or asparagus, blanched briefly, are better today.
- The five-minute finishThat timing assumes the canned garnish is already fully cooked and only needs heating through. If you substitute fresh asparagus tips or beans, blanch them separately and give them no more than a minute in the consommé or they will go drab.
- ConsomméThe recipe presumes a clear, well-seasoned consommé made elsewhere in the book. Do not let the glazing liquid cloud it: lift the vegetables out with a slotted spoon and add only a spoonful or two of their syrup.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of consommé, four to six small first-course servings.
Printanier — the book spells it "prentanier" — simply means "of springtime," and in classical French kitchen usage it denotes a garnish of young vegetables cut to neat uniform shapes and added to a clear soup at the moment of service. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, wrote for American households at a period when restaurant French cookery was widely imitated, and the technique here is a professional one: vegetables glazed under a buttered paper in a covered pan, held ready, then dropped into consommé, letting a cook serve "spring" soup in February.